Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA (opens in new tab)

"Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we want to, or even think that way.

The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news broke back in 2013, HN's front page was overrun with copycat stories that were simply follow-ups and added no new information. Many users complained about this, and they were right. So we applied the best tool we had available, with the intention of taking it off when the flood died down, and so we eventually did.

I hope, at the very least, the homepage should have a disclaimer saying that the links are not a collective effort by the community but rather a filtered list by administrators.

As other replies to you have mentioned, the discussion surrounding those articles were vitriolic and heavily partisan, to boot.

I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on

Now I don't know if this comment thread is (currently) at the bottom of the page because of +/- votes or a ploy to stifle discussion on NSA and Snowden.

With that, no country would have the NSA's current capability. No such possibility existed with nuclear weapons.

What better tech are you hypothesizing? You've seem to have already come to the conclusion that the tech we have isn't enough, while preemptively declaring that policy can't solve the West's issues. I think that technical literacy amongst legal professionals and legal literacy amongst technical professionals are steps in the right direction towards a balance of safety and liberty, and are ones that do not immediately entail increasing the scope of surveillance programs.

There won't be any deterrent effect with tools that remain secret and unattributable after they are used. We've already seen that NSA dominance isn't going to lead to a truce in the style of the Cold War. For example, see the Chinese NSA counterparts who were recently indicted in the US, or the suspected Russians who can't be rooted out of the State Department network. The fact that the NSA is (probably) better at that kind of mayhem didn't stop them.

I fear the invention of electronic warfare will be more like the introduction of firearms than of nuclear weapons.

The moral justification for the bomb was a concern that Germany was working on a similar project after they stopped exports of uranium[1]. Japan and Russia had little to do with the decision.

In fact, several people working on the Manhattan project later commented they regretted the decision to develop the bomb, especially after hostilities ended in the European Theater abating the threat of Nazi Germany developing the bomb first.

Feynman has commented[2] specifically that his focus on the work had totally blinded him to this change in moral justification. "What I did immorally, I would say, was not to remember the reason I said I was doing it, so that when the reason changed, which was that Germany was defeated, not the single thought came to my mind at all about that; that that meant now that I had to reconsider why I'm continuing to do this."

Just because something is possible doesn't mean it should be done, even if there was a justification in the past.

Also, the tools that the NSA wields may not be as bloody - with some exceptions[3] - but the cost in terms of the number of people affected already exceeded the losses due to the bomb, and will continue to grow in the future. Personal-scale tools that can do their work mostly hidden from public view have very little cost to the attacker. People notice and might get angry about using the bomb, while blackmail, threats, and bribery can continue for years and years before enough people notice. (and small casual racism or sexism can continue for centuries, even after people start to think the problem is "fixed")

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_l...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE#t=986

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-...

You're wrong on two counts.

1.) It's American foreign policy that created anti-american Islamic extremism. It's American foreign policy that must fix it. You cannot expect tech to fix the problems of that. Technologies are tools, nothing more. Terrorists and tax payers are technology users alike, and that will always be the case. (Sidenote: anyone who is intelligent should hate the word 'terrorism', it is blatantly doublespeak.)

2.) These spy tools are going to die, because we can make technology that makes them infeasible. Indeed, we already have. Tor is reportedly unstoppable by the NSA. GPG exists and falls under the same category. The way things are headed, the only thing that will change with time is that tech companies will embrace encryption and help the general population of innocents to stop being tracked.

Those that care enough (eg: terrorists, libertarians, anarchists, and nerds) have already taken back their freedom... And will continue to do so. And there's nothing those 3 letter agencies can do to prevent it, because they've shown their hand. Anyone who has taken a cryptography class / a theory class knows that it's an unwinnable battle to try to fight RSA... It's just a matter of time before someone persuasive enough gets the message through to policy makers.

I think that actually " all the embarrassingly smart technologists around here" need to spend their time designing and creating better tech that doesnt allow the alphabet soup agencies the option to spy on people in such a broad fahsion, making it expensive and difficult to spy on everyone means they have to spend more time looking for the people worth spying on and only spying when they think it is worthwhile and going to lead to something.

what happens now is they spy on everyone, then after an incident go backwards through the data to see what led up to the incident. Which is useless to all the dead and inujured and usually only works to point out where these agencies missed opportunities to prevent the attack.

To give you an example, the recent terrorist hostage taking in Sydney, there was no warning or raising of the terror threat prior to the incident by the Australian Secret Services, although they are fully involved in the spying and are linked with the NSA and GCHQ. After the event we find out that there were double digit warnings provided by members of the public to a information line put in place to act as a confidential way to raise a concern. If they didnt rely on spying on everyone they would be in a better position to investigate tips such as this and focus all (or more) of their resources on these individuals instead of spreading it thinly across everyone.

Isn't this Godwin's non-sequitur? Snowden was talking about physics as a whole, not bringing nationalism into it.

Question: Mr Snowden, do you feel that your worst fear is being realized, that most people don't care about their privacy

Answer: To answer the question, I don't. Poll after poll is confirming that, contrary to what we tend to think, people not only care, they care a lot. The problem is we feel disempowered. We feel like we can't do anything about it, so we may as well not try.

The full answer is worth reading: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s...

What's worse, truly not giving a shit, or giving a shit but giving up because there isn't enough outward validation?

I think the point he is making is that you can act as an individual, you do not have to, nor should you, depend on politicians or corporations to make this right for you. Even one individual like Snowden can have a significant effect on the world given the right leverage.

EDIT: if you think you have my address please email it to me (its in my profile). my opsec is far from perfect, haha, but I doubt its bad enough for you to have found it (that quickly anyway)

10pm local. checked again. still black and silent. all other channels fine still, showing shows.

I think this is an interesting question, because it intersects with the rise and fall of the nation state - at some point (perhaps that point has already been reached) corporations will have greater reach and greater power than nation states and individuals will start to feel less allegiance to the state of their birth. Will they start to look to companies to protect their rights?

I disagree that laws which govern a nation state are the right level for this sort of issue or that nation states are more trustworthy - those are precisely the laws which have been subverted and used against us in order to subvert encryption of websites, sim cards or any of our other communications and allow recording of it all. Just as one example of how easily our laws are subverted the man in charge of supervising UK surveillance can be bought for a few thousand pounds for trivial matters:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/23/mp-malcolm-r...

International law is even worse. Even with the relatively good accountability and civil rights in the US (for most citizens most of the time), the US government has arrogated the right to kill you without trial, detain you indefinitely without trial, or torture you without legal recourse because to give you legal recourse would endanger state secrets. Such is the state of our civil rights - they are selectively applied and withdrawn by the state as it suits them, and words like traitor or terrorist are used to put someone beyond the pale of civilisation and therefore outlaw.

Here is what Snowden had to say about it on that AMA:

How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.

I agree with that - what is effective is moral certitudes which individuals agree and act upon, not nation state law or international law which are so easily ignored or subverted. That means technical solutions, not legal ones, though I agree it is better to rely on neither the nation state nor the corporation in proposing solutions.